JellyCar 3 drives iPhone Games of the Week

This week, we got another installment to Disney Mobile’s JellyCar series with JellyCar 3, and if you’re a fan of the previous iterations of JellyCar, you’ll find yourself right at home with the new entry into the side-scrolling squishy car puzzler. But this week saw a lot of great games, mostly puzzlers actually, but with […]

This week, we got another installment to Disney Mobile’s JellyCar series with JellyCar 3, and if you’re a fan of the previous iterations of JellyCar, you’ll find yourself right at home with the new entry into the side-scrolling squishy car puzzler. But this week saw a lot of great games, mostly puzzlers actually, but with one arcade-style endless jumping standout in The Blocks Cometh by Halfbot. You don’t just jump from platform to platform in Blocks — you have to avoid getting killed by them as they fall from above you. We’ve got those, and three more entries, for you below to make up the best iPhone Games of the Week.

JellyCar 3 ($0.99)

This goofy physics puzzler has a ton of personality. All you have to do is drive your squishy cartoon jelly car over some obstacles in an attempt to find each level’s exit. But things get complicated in a hurry by moving floors, ramps, catapults and other objects. Plus, your jelly car has a tendency to get squished inside things, flip over and bounce around, making control a little dicey and requiring some skill. Every stage is timed, so the goal becomes figuring out where to go and how best to get there, without accidentally bouncing around and costing yourself precious seconds. The best part about JellyCar 3, however, is its personality. All the sound effects are the kind someone makes with their mouth (boing when the car bounces, for example), the art style is minimalistic and child-like. JellyCar 3 is a child-like game and seems to be marketed that way, at least a little, but you don’t need to be under 10 to enjoy it.

The Blocks Cometh by Halfbot ($0.99)

Another arcade-style endless jumping game, right? Wrong — The Blocks Cometh is more like an endless cascade of deadly blocks that you must scale in order to survive. Your character can jump up on top of blocks, shoot them to clear a path, and hug their edges to kick off and get more height. And it’s all about height — the higher you get, the higher your score on the game’s Open Feint leaderboards. The Blocks Cometh features four unlockable characters in addition to Blockman, the first one available, and two of those characters are from League of Evil. Yes, there’s some cross-compatibility between League and Blocks, and League has Blocks content coming in a future update. A great art style and addictive gameplay will keep you climbing.

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Puckerz! ($0.99)

It’s a brick-breaking game, sure, but Puckerz! is a whole lot more strategic than most other members of its genre. Instead of bouncing an endlessly mobile ball off a paddle, trying to save it from getting lost as well as tear through structures on the level, Puckerz! takes more of an air hockey approach. Your “puck” is mobile and bouncy, but eventually it runs out of momentum, and you have to “shoot” it again by determining the direction and force you want to use. Force becomes important after a couple of levels, when you need to break and collect as many of the objects on each stage as possible while avoiding hazards. You’re also racing the clock, so the more time you spend considering your next shot, the less time you actually have to completely clear the stage. But you’ll lose time if you hit a hazard, so some consideration is the key to success.

Infinight ($0.99)

Awakening with no memory in a darkened, deserted hospital, you wander the pitch black halls in this top-down puzzler, searching for a way out and clues to the past, with only distant lightning to show you the way. As you move through the hospital, you’ll discover tape recorders that provide clues to the story — and horrors, like red vortexes that only appear during lightning strikes. The campaign mode of Infinight has 50 levels for you to navigate, which is impressive, and the app also includes an online multiplayer mode. It uses an interesting and tense light and dark mechanic to take puzzles like these, which are pretty standard, in a whole different direction.

Rooms: The Main Building ($5.99)

Trapped in a strange mansion with a stranger talking book, Rooms is a puzzler in which your side-scrolling character moves through different rooms that you can shift around to make a path. The rooms in between him and the exit can be moved, and often have to be rearranged to get a wall out from between you and the way forward, for example, or to bring a ladder into sync with the room above. It’s an interesting concept that makes for some brain-bending puzzles. Rooms has previously been seen on the Nintendo Wii and maintains its charm in this port. It includes two play modes beyond the standard story mode so you get about 80 levels of head-scratching puzzle goodness for your six bucks.

Phil Hornshaw is a freelance writer, editor and author living in Los Angeles, dividing his time between playing video games, playing video games on his cell phone, and writing about playing video games. He’s also the co-author of So You Created a Wormhole: The Time Traveler’s Guide to Time Travel, which attempts to mix time travel pop culture with some semblance of science, as well as tips on the appropriate means of riding dinosaurs. Check out his Google+ profile.